WASHINGTON (AFP) — The sandwich men of the 21st century are young athletes leaping about, spinning and flipping their advertising posters over their heads and flailing them like rock guitars to grab the attention of shoppers.
On the side of the street in downtown Washington, a team dressed in red shirts juggles, flips and spins its giant arrow-shaped ad-boards to promote a new real estate development.
"It's a good pay: 10 dollars an hour starting off and then 10 cents for every trick," Nicholas Thomson told AFP.
Thomson has been a "sign spinner" for a year, since he began working for Aarrow Advertising, which deploys squadrons of spinners around the country to drum up business for advertisers.
They stand at red lights, on highway medians, and in shopping center parking lots to attract attention with a panoply of acrobatic tricks.
Thomson, who now trains newcomers to the Aarrow team, shows some of the maneuvers: the basic sign flip, the helicopter -- spinning it overhead like a rotor -- and "around the world," keeping the sign twirling on a fingertip while the spinner turns his body 360 degrees.
"A lot of people get tired of traditional forms of advertising: newspapers, TV, radio, the Internet," said Thomas Brunet, Aarrow's sales director.
"Companies are looking for new ways to reach their target markets," But, while carrying sandwich boards was a job for the down and out, sign spinning demands a new type of worker.
-- 'We pay a lot better than the regular sandwich man' --
"To do this, we need someone who is energetic, outgoing, who loves to be at the center of the attention, someone who considers himself as an athlete," Brunet said.
"Because you are out there for five, six, seven hours at a time and it's constant exercise. ... Some of these tricks are very hard to do. Not every one can do it."
Launched in California in 2002 by an ex-student bored with the plodding conventional sandwich board work, Aarrow now employs about 700 spinners around the country, publicizing with its trademark red arrow posters everything from restaurants and shops to apartments for rent.
Businesses pay Aarrow a basic rate and pay more for the number of tricks they want the spinner to put in his routine -- boosting the spinner's wage as well.
The company now has an annual turnover of five to seven million dollars a year from operations in seven major cites including Los Angeles, New York and Washington.
It has a catalogue of 200 tricks its clients can choose from, and it is looking at setting up franchises for the business, Brunet said.
They recruited at the outset from among students.
"We pay a lot better than the regular sandwich man because we ask a lot of skills. Not everyone can do this job," Brunet said.
Not everyone, indeed: a potential Aarrow spinner has to pass through a week-long "boot camp," with six hours of sign-juggling instruction a day.
"We treat it like a sport," Brunet said. "They have practice with coaches and whistles, they do strength conditioning, they compete against each other to see who is the best sign spinner."
The classic move is to make the sign whirl around one's body, passing it over the shoulders before pausing for a moment, putting a knee to the ground and wielding the sign like a rock guitarist in mid-solo.
That gives passers-by on foot and in cars a chance to read the sign.
"There's nothing better than an actual person, looking at you, making eye contact, smiling at you and communicating the message. And on top of that they are performing for you," Brunet said.
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